Customers May Not Identify New Project as Brian Doerksen’s

The staff member who checked in the CDs was surprised when I told her that the album was actually a new project from Brian Doerksen. In the U.S. market, I supposed there would have been a sticker attached to the shrink-wrap, “New from Worship Leader Brian Doerksen.” Here, we’re relying on word-of-mouth to accomplish that, I guess. The following is from my consumer review which appeared at Thinking Out Loud:

The Shiyr Poets (pronounced ‘sheer’) takes a word-for-word approach to the book of Psalms, but with a conversion to modern English from the Hebrew and with the addition of recurring choruses as keeping with the structure of modern music. In many ways, bringing these texts into our century captures the heart and anguish of the Psalmist in ways we might miss with a cursory reading of the text.

The band is the latest project from worship leader Brian Doerksen composer of Refiner’s Fire, Come Now Is The Time to Worship, You Shine, and Faithful One. The sound is consistent with past Doerksen albums, a gentle, more intimate sound. (Foreshadowing this project was the song Fortress 144 from a few years back; a song Brian said was written especially to be a song that men could embrace in a corporate worship setting.)

On Songs for the Journey, Volume One the goal is to begin working sequentially through the book of Psalms, hence this album covers the first ten, with two bonus tracks. Yes, this is an ambitious project! The group used crowd-funding to partially underwrite the launch of the first project and probably would need to do that again to create successive volumes, as this has not been produced for a major label.

You can listen to an audio sample from Psalm 3, at the band’s website by clicking here, or watch a video from a Christian television program here and here. The physical album is currently only available in Canada, but elsewhere customers can download it from iTunes.

Again, there’s a lot going on in the Psalms that we miss, and this project accurately captures both the tension and the wonder.

Those of you not having AdBlock on your browser: Let me know who and what type of advertisements WordPress adds to the end of these articles.

NOTE: This trade blog is for Christian bookstore owners, Christian publishers and record labels, and nationally distributed Christian authors and musicians.

Now in its 9th year, this blog raises issues that affect all Christian booksellers, authors, publishers and record companies; with an extra focus reflecting a Canadian perspective on the industry. If that's not you, keep reading anyway, articles here have broader impact for people who love Christian books. Retailers: let your staff know about this resource and encourage them to check regularly or submit stories.

When advertising appears at the bottom of an article, it does not originate with Thinking Out Loud Blog Network, nor are we aware of it. You're encouraged to use Firefox as your browser with the Ad-Block-Plus add-on.